From Death to Life How Salvation Works with Allen Nelson IV

Welcome to The Wrap Report with Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretations and applications.

This is the ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

All right, welcome to another edition of The Wrap Report. Today's topic we're going to be talking about, well, we're going to talk about salvation, how it works.

What does it mean to be saved? Boy, is that a confusing terminology these days, isn't it?

And we're going to have an author of the book, From Death to Life, How Salvation Works. So welcome to the airwaves,

Alan Nelson IV. How are you, Alan? I'm doing well, Andrew. It's a privilege to be on and thank you for the opportunity to talk about this today.

Well, before we get into your book, I first want to let you introduce yourself to our audience. Not everyone may...

They may not know who you are. John MacArthur follows after you, but everyone may not know that.

Yeah. Well, first of all, that's not true. I'm a nobody.

I'm just... I live in Central Arkansas and I pastor a Southern Baptist Church here in Arkansas, Second Baptist Church of Perryville.

My wife and I have been married a little over 12 years and we have five children.

The oldest is just turned 11 and the youngest will turn two in May.

So that's a really quick introduction. How much further you want me to go? No, that's good.

And so you also blog and this is how I became aware of you. You are a blogger on thingsabove .us,

which is, I kind of know a bunch of the other bloggers over there. And so that's how I had found out about you and your book.

But I do want to discuss with you the issue of salvation.

You wrote a book on something that, boy, there's been a lot of trees that have been killed over this book, hasn't there?

Over the topic, I should say. Yeah, that's right. First off, why do you write the book?

Why do you feel that there's been so much on this topic and so much disagreement on this topic?

Yeah. So I've talked with some other brothers who have asked me similar questions, just either on Twitter or phone conversation or in person.

And you know, Andrew, the heart behind why I wrote this book is obviously I wanted people to read it, but I wanted people in my community to read it.

And I feel like giving them a book that I wrote increases the chances of them reading it.

So I'm not trying to come at this as saying I know something that all these other people in the history of the church don't know.

I'm just trying to offer a fresh perspective from the 21st century of just a pastor who is dealing with these situations.

You know, that's another impetus of just dealing with these situations. This is not one of those things that you talk...

This isn't talking about the difference between supra and infralapsarianism. This is talking about the real time, very extremely practical things that we have to deal with in the church.

How does a person move from death to life? How are they converted? So that's really the motivation. That's why

I wrote this and particularly thinking about the people in my community and my congregation. Yeah. And the thing is, you make a valid point because someone who encouraged me to write my first book, that was a very similar reason he gave.

Just so that you could be able to say, here's something I wrote, it does get a person more likely to read it.

And I think that there's some people who they want to be the big name author. You're not. I was greatly encouraged by something you had said even in the prefix to your book.

You said, quote, 20 years from now, you may have forgotten this book, but if the principles we discuss within stick,

I'm fine with that unquote. I think that's great because that's the heart. It's not about you and I.

It's not about people knowing our name. I say this when I do street evangelism all the time. It doesn't matter if you know who

I am. It matters whether you know Christ. When you put this book out there, it was interesting because you started off this book dealing with a passage of scripture.

One that I say is the scariest passage in all the Bible, Matthew 7, 21 to 23.

Why'd you start there? Well, I think, and part of this is some of the guys

I follow, the John MacArthur and I don't know if you've ever heard of Richard Owen Roberts, but there's just been some men influential in my life that I think that they're right in the sense that there are people who are in our pews who are unconverted.

Not just people in our roles, but people who occasionally dabble in and out of the church or maybe even are members and come quite frequently.

It really concerns me, Andrew, that they genuinely think they're converted, but they're not.

That's really one of the hearts of this book is there are people who I call the walking dead that are just walking around and they have a formal sort of religion, but they really don't have, they don't love

Christ, bottom line. Folks who are familiar with the Ray Comfort calls that a false conversion. I call it hypocrisy.

I think most people will hear that Christ spoke more about hell than heaven.

A lot of people hear that Christ spoke more about money than heaven and hell combined. What I don't see a lot of people speak about is that Christ spoke about hypocrisy more than heaven, hell, and money combined.

Why do you think hypocrisy is such a big deal when we talk about the area of salvation? Well, I think, well,

I'm pretty convinced biblically that the human heart is a mess and the human heart is willing to do what it can to assuage its guilt.

If you look around culture, everybody knows we're guilty.

That's manifest either in false religions. It's manifest in secularism. Nobody wants to hear about how homosexuality, abortion is wrong.

They hate it. They hate hearing that because they already are dealing with guilt. And so this comes into Christianity as well, and that is the human heart doesn't want to submit to God, but also doesn't want to feel guilty.

So how do you deal with that? If you don't want to submit to God and you don't want to feel guilty, well, one outlet in the

Bible, well, anyway, one outlet is to try to pretend that you're following God and that in your own mind solves both problems.

Now you're kind of pretending to follow God and your heart doesn't feel the guilt as much per se, and so now you think you've found a solution when in reality you haven't.

So hopefully that kind of opens up or answers that question. That's one way to look at it,

I think. Well, when you look historically, we've seen Constantine comes in and just goes, okay, we're all

Christian. And we're going to get into, I want to ask you, what is salvation?

I want to be precise in our terminology in a few minutes, but when he just declares that, you end up having people who are non -regenerate who suddenly are being told they're now

Christian because the emperor said so. We end up seeing unregenerate people trying to fit in to a culture of Christians.

I think that's similar to what you're describing. And we see some things that they did back then that are still being done today where they want to change the message of Christianity to something that makes them feel more comfortable without really dealing with the real message.

And so you address a little bit in the book the issue of the gimmicks. And let me just read a quote from your book.

After the first chapter, you said, quote, it is my hope that we examine the reality of how sinners move from death to life, that in light of truth will shine so brightly that all the gimmickry and worldly entrapments will fall away, unquote.

Why is it so important to get the truth out there over just making people feel good? Like the dramas and the gimmicks, people feel good about it.

I mean, Joelstein makes people feel good. What's wrong with that? Yeah, what's wrong with that is we are coddling people.

We're making them comfortable and feeling good all the way into a godless eternity.

And by godless, I don't mean that God in hell, they don't get away from God, but God's wrath is manifest for eternity.

And so we're coddling them right up to hell. That's why this matters. So what if you make them feel comfortable and encourage them, quote, unquote, as they make their way to hell and perish for all eternity?

This is serious. As you well know, obviously, but this is serious. And so when we play and try to diminish the realities of a holy

God and the necessity of repentance and true faith in Christ and we boil that down to, hey, just say this prayer and you and God are good, then we are doing great damage to the souls of men and women who we tell them that they're

OK when they're not. So let's talk about the importance of this. I mean, a person could be right in every other area of Christian doctrine.

And if they get this one wrong, it literally is the difference between heaven and hell. Yeah. And so with that in mind,

I mean, this is why your book becomes so important, because we need to get this one doctrine right if we're going to have eternal life.

So you end up and I want to deal with some of the chapters because you end up talking about, as you said earlier, the walking dead.

You have people who are in churches. They're being taught all kinds of Christian doctrine. And yet this one area, they don't want to listen to.

You refer to them as walking dead, which I do at least understand the pop culture.

I will admit you have a bunch of pop culture references in there that there's probably a bunch more I didn't get because I don't get all of them.

But I do know Walking Dead is some TV show. Yeah. Yeah. My audience knows that I'm pop culture illiterate.

But why do you refer to them as the walking dead? Well, I think one of the most difficult things,

I think this could be very difficult at times to discern a person's salvation, because sometimes you might look at a person and notice that everything they're doing, like nobody has something written on their forehead that just says,

I'm lost. So they're moving. They're participating. And probably if you called them at three in the morning and you needed help changing your tire because you're stuck on the side of the road, they might come and help you.

You know, so it's hard to say, well, these people, do they hate God? I mean, experientially, it doesn't seem like that.

But the point that I'm trying to make is even though they're walking around and they're moving and they're participating, they have not been born again.

Their heart is a heart of stone. They are dead in their trespasses and sins. And at the end of the day, they are at enmity with God.

They do not want God to rule over their life. And it's right and biblical to say they actually do hate

God. Well, Scripture says that we are his enemies. So that's not a stretch to say that.

But when we look at this, we look at people who are walking around spiritually dead, but yet they're in the church.

Do you think the church does kind of a disservice to not be seeking to explain the gospel message to people?

Well, let me use this quick analogy. Would we think that a doctor's office is doing a disservice to people to know that they have terminal cancer that they could possibly cure, but they don't want to say it because, man, wouldn't that ruin your day?

You don't want to hear that, right? So would a hospital or a doctor's office be doing a disservice? I think all of us would say that would be horrible.

That would be wicked. A doctor that's just letting people come in and he knows that they have cancer. He could possibly cure it if they would go through the treatment rightly.

But you know what? That would ruin their Monday. So why even tell them?

Well, we would all scoff at that. We'd say, that's horrible. You should revoke his license. Well, this is what churches are doing.

When we coddle sinners and we say to them, y 'all, you're probably

OK or even worse than that and put our stamp of approval on them. And this is something that my own denomination is wrestling with or I wish would be wrestling with more.

But a lot of Southern Baptist churches, even my own church, this is something that we're in our plans to address.

But our church roles and the people who come, it just doesn't match up. And so we as a whole have put a stamp of approval on people telling them, well, we think that you're a

Christian when in reality, many of them are not believers. And so, yes, long answer for a short answer here.

Yes, the church is doing a disservice to allow people to remain thinking they're believers when they're not.

It's funny that you bring that reference up. It's in your book as well. I have a CD that we give out to folks when we go evangelizing because the

CD has more intrinsic value. People are less likely to throw it out rather than a gospel track in paper.

And I want to play for you a clip because I use that same analogy at the very beginning of the message.

It's called the most important message you could ever hear because I'm trying to do just that with a person who may be a believer or an unbeliever or think they're a believer.

I want to make sure that they understand the importance of that. I use the same analogy. Take a listen and we could see what you think because it kind of says exactly what you said.

Let me ask you a question. If there were two type of doctor and you had cancer, which of these two doctors would you go to?

Doctor number one is a doctor who knows you have the cancer. They know that the treatment is 100 percent curable.

But the problem is that they don't think you're going to actually go through all of the treatment step by step the way it's prescribed.

And therefore, they feel it would just be better to tell you to go home and try to get better and to enjoy as much as you can.

Doctor number two tells you that you have cancer. It's a very serious cancer and it will kill you within six months time.

However, he's got a cure. It's a very rigorous process and you must follow it exactly. But he has a way that can be 100 percent cured of this cancer.

Which doctor would you rather go to? I'm sure if you're like me, you'd rather go to a doctor who's going to tell you some bad news, something you don't really want to hear because he's got some good news to follow it.

And the good news is only good when we hear how bad the bad news is. If the doctor just told you what the prescription was without telling you that you had cancer, you wouldn't follow it.

And so that's basically a similar message to what you had said. We want to go to a doctor that's going to give us the truth, not make us feel better.

How much more important than in this area, we're talking about spiritual life and death more than physical life and death?

Yeah, absolutely. Wow. And in your analogy, your analogy is spot on. In fact, it's almost like I should put a footnote and say, you know,

I hadn't listened to that before I wrote the book. But yeah, very similar. So why are you telling people, not you, and why are churches telling people you should try

Jesus? You know, let's try Jesus. And not why would anybody try Jesus if they don't understand their need for him?

So why would they just want to surrender their life to the God of the universe if they don't understand the problem?

So a lot of churches are trying to minimize the reality of our situation and not talking about sin, not talking about the holiness of God, not talking about the reality of hell, but then saying, yeah, but you should try

Jesus. He'll make your life better. And this is, yes, this is a great disservice. And how much more wicked is this than the doctor analogy?

Because this is eternal matters. Well, OK, so after a commercial, I want to get us into some trouble probably.

But I want to talk about. That sounds fun. Yeah. I want to talk about the altar calls and your view on that.

So let's talk about that right after this. OK. Can you answer the following questions for your children or for the person to whom you are witnessing?

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Andrew Rappaport's new book, What Do We Believe? It will help you a ton to get your copy at what do we believe book dot com.

What do we believe book dot com. All right. It's important to understand what we believe.

And that's really what we're talking about here, talking about specifically the doctrine of salvation. Now, Pastor Alan, my question to you is we see altar calls, especially you're a

Southern Baptist, especially within Southern Baptists. I know someone who actually said that if there isn't an altar call in a church, he wouldn't attend it because somehow he thinks that they're going soft on the gospel.

So let me ask it this way. First, I already read your book, so I know the answer. But do you think that we need an altar call?

And then the follow up is, do you see a problem with the altar call being done in churches?

And how in relation to what we're just talking with this good and bad doctor, what does the altar call end up representing?

Yeah. So do we need an altar call? The answer is for me, it's a no.

And the reason is because that's not in the scriptures. And if we're going to hold the sufficiency of scripture, then we have to hold that whatever the

Bible tells us about church and salvation and the invitation to the gospel, that is sufficient.

We don't have to come up with new things in order to make the gospel work.

So short answer, first one, no. And then the second question, I think, so I want to be careful.

I'll actually mention his name, Dr. Herschel York from Southern Seminary encouraged me. The first copy of the book was a little stronger on the altar call, but he encouraged me.

And I think rightly so. Don't throw out everybody because I think that. So, for example,

I think that there are people who issue a time at the end of the service, probably similar to what we do, where if someone comes forward, that's fine.

But it's not geared towards that. The whole service is not rolling towards that. You just kind of have this song at the end of the service.

And then, you know, sometimes maybe someone might come up and want to talk to you. That's so I'm not talking about that.

But this what I am talking about is this your the altar call, as I'm defining it, is you're geared towards it at the end of the service.

You're pleading with people to come forward when they come forward. You're trying to get them through this quick process of, you know, do you know your sinner?

Yes. You want to go to heaven? Yes. OK, let's say this prayer. And that's problematic for a number of reasons, the first of which

I've already mentioned, it's not in the Bible. The second is because like like we mentioned with this doctor situation, what you're doing is you're giving a a solution for a problem that they don't understand that they have, if that makes sense.

And then you're not even really giving the solution anyway, because you've turned repentance and faith into just repeating this prayer.

And so what has happened is and I deal with so I'm on the front lines in this because I'm in the

Bible Belt. I deal with this all the time. Are you a Christian? Yes. How do you know you're a

Christian? Well, when I was such and such age, we had this altar call. I said this prayer, OK, where do you go to church?

I don't go to church. Oh, what about you know, what about your life now? Well, I'm I'm caught in all these different sins and I don't want to I don't care about getting out of them, but I know

I'm going to go to heaven because I said this prayer. So, yes, it does a great disservice. Yeah. One of the things when

I'm on the streets, especially in the Bible Belt, but when I have someone that says, well, I'm a Christian, you know, I go to church.

I like I think I got this from Gabe Hughes. He said what he usually does is what's the name of church you're a member of?

And when they give the name, he says, so if I call that pastor that he knows who you are, when was the last time you attended there? And it's.

But what I usually do, I'll give an analogy. I'll say, so, you know, you have a because I hear a lot is why

I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And I'll say, oh, so you have a personal relationship. So you talk to him, he talks to you.

Oh, yeah. I said, I'll say, OK, so let me let me give you a scenario just to see how what kind of relationship this would be like.

If you got married, you go off to your honeymoon, you come back from the honeymoon and your spouse says to you, hey, that was a great time.

I really enjoyed it. I'm going to go back to my place and I'm going to give you a call, you know, every couple of times a month.

What would you think? And they're usually like, oh, that's not a relationship. Because what you end up doing is if you ask them, how many times do you read your

Bible? The average I get is a couple of times a month. And so if they admit to that, then you can give this scenario and just say, so if your spouse and you have no relationship when you're only talking to them a couple times a month, what kind of relationship is it you're claiming you have?

Because they really don't have one. I mean, with the altar call, and I think you point this out, it really leads, does it not, to easy believism?

Yeah, absolutely. That is an easy believism. What we're saying is you just we're not obviously

Andrew and I are not trying to make this more difficult than it is. But easy believism is simply just saying, you know what,

I don't have to meet the requirements that Christ calls me to meet. The requirements

Christ calls me to meet is to repent and believe the gospel. But easy believism is

I can just affirm some of these facts in my mind, but nothing really has to change.

And repentance is I can just feel bad for my sins. That's obviously involved in repentance, but that is not all that repentance is.

Yeah, I mean, we say that salvation is easy, but there is a specific thing where people are walking down an aisle during an altar call, but there's no change in their life.

And it's not that we're saying there has to be works for salvation. And we want to get to this in a bit because you give out some how salvation actually works.

But it is important for us first to understand when we talk about salvation, because there's so much hypocrisy in the church.

And this is why I like the way you laid out your book. You first address that. And maybe it's because you're in the Bible Belt. But for so many people,

I think that the hardest thing is not to get them saved. It's to get them lost.

So especially like in an area like the Bible Belt, I'm in New Jersey. I mean, there's no one pretending to be a

Christian here because Christianity is almost going to be outlawed in New Jersey first.

But seriously, I mean, in an area where you do have a lot of people that are putting on the

Christian face, the layout of your book, you first address the issue of hypocrisy, identifying what it means to be saved before you get into the whole doctrine and how it works.

So why is it that is important to lay out first before getting into what salvation is?

Well, I mentioned this earlier, but we live in a world where almost everybody from the secular atheist to the

Muslim to Jehovah's Witness, all these false worldviews, almost everybody will admit there's something wrong with humanity.

And so Christianity, what you have in the Bible Belt and other places is people giving that kind of admission.

Oh, yes, of course I'm not. Of course I'm not perfect. Nobody's perfect. And so if you ask people in the

Bible Belt, do they need Jesus and other places in the United States, do they need Jesus?

I think a lot of people actually would probably say, well, yeah, I need, I need Jesus. But the problem is they don't actually believe that.

They don't really think, they don't really understand the depth of their losses. And so the reason that that is so important, if a person doesn't understand the depth of their lostness, then deep in their heart, they may confess to you they need

Jesus, but in their heart, they don't really need Jesus. The person who's gone to prison, the person who's strung out on drugs, the prostitute, those people, they really need

Jesus. Me, I'm not perfect, obviously, but do I really need

Jesus? I feel like someone like me, he probably can go ahead and give me a pass. That's sort of the mentality that we're dealing with.

And so if you don't have a firm foundation of what it means that we're separated from God, wicked and vile, apart from Christ, then there's really no cause.

Some people put it this way, you have to preach the law before you can preach the gospel.

You have to understand that people have to understand what they've done, how they've broken God's law and how they're separated from God, or otherwise, why would they even care about Christ?

Very true. So I want to move in now to discussing what salvation is, because you lay out in your book, and this is one of the things

I really appreciate about your book. You avoid some of the, shall we say, hot button labels that people react to.

Yeah. And instead, just find and describe the terminology so that people who have that knee -jerk reaction actually would end up agreeing,

I think, with what you've written because they're not reading into it, meanings that sometimes we have that knee -jerk reaction to.

So after this commercial, what I'd like to do is I want to ask you, what is salvation?

And when you say how it works, what is it first? And then let's start talking about how it works. Okay. The good news is

Striving for Eternity would love to come to your church to spend two days with your folks, teaching them biblical hermeneutics.

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to host a Bible interpretation made easy seminar in your area. Now, Alan, Jeremiah 29 11 is not your life verse, is it?

Well, I'm just over here weeping and in the fetal position. That's ruined my life.

No, that's a good commercial. That's really good. So yeah, I mean, this is, you know, we get into discussing the area of salvation.

I really think that's what's lacking is the issue of hermeneutics, how to interpret the Bible. This is why easy believism and all these other things have crept in and the altar call has been used the way it is,

I think so much because people are not spending the time diligently studying.

And so I do think it's really important because I believe if people understood how to interpret better, maybe you wouldn't have had to need to have the need to write the book you did.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. So when we talk about salvation, help me understand when salvation is a broad term, but you're using it in a specific way.

When we talk salvation, this causes confusion for some people. Salvation can be referred to that time that we get redeemed, regenerated.

For Christians, that's a past event in time. Salvation can refer to this current state for us when we're being sanctified.

We're being made more in the image of Christ. That's that process. But there's also a salvation referring to a future state for us, that glorification.

Now, it could refer to all of those, but in your book, you're specifically referring to one of those.

So when you say how salvation works, what are you referring to? Yeah, and let me clarify as well, because even within the book,

I think, although it's maybe not spelled out as specifically, but even in the book, there's a difference between, or sorry,

I want to paint a different understanding between justification, regeneration, conversion, justification.

I don't really talk about adoption that much, but that's what I'm really referring to primarily.

Although we do also talk about sanctification, but when I talk about how salvation works, primarily

I'm talking about that regeneration to conversion to justification, and then how that results, sanctification in a life that seeks to live holy and separate and under the lordship of Christ.

So we talk about that part where, as we said earlier, you mentioned we go from being an enemy of God to a child of God.

Let's talk through that process when we say how salvation works. What exactly goes on?

That's actually what we should start with. You have, you point out in your chapter, no news is bad news.

You talk about the fact that the fall affected every human, and you're specific in what it affected.

So how did the curse of sin affect humanity? Yeah. Maybe an easier question is how did it not?

But the point, hopefully for your listeners, I imagine most are probably well studied in these things, but for those who are listening or not, what we're saying is the fall affected humanity in every way imaginable.

And so when you talk, I don't think I used to term total depravity. Perhaps I do, but when we say words like total depravity, we don't mean that every human is as evil as they possibly can be, but we do mean that the effect of the fall is total.

Our minds, our wills, our hearts, our desires, every single thing about humanity is affected because of the fall of our first parents,

Adam and Eve. And so our thinking's affected? Our thinking, yes. Our thinking, our choices, our quote unquote free will, everything is affected.

Yes. And so, cause you went to really where the heart of the issue is, where people debate over.

You mentioned our quote unquote free will. We would agree we have choices. We have a will, but was that in your view, was that affected by the fall?

Absolutely. And we see this experientially. So Andrew, I don't know if you're, are you a vegetable guy?

You like vegetables? I eat vegetables. So let's pretend for a moment, you just, you don't like broccoli.

You just can't stand it. And I say to you, yeah, but just choose to like it. Just choose to like broccoli.

Well, you can't do that. Why? Because you don't like broccoli. That's, or if I put, you know, rancid meat in front of you that a buzzard would eat, you know, just choose to like that.

Well, you're not going to do that. And nobody would say, yeah, but, but I got free will. No one, no one would make that argument in that, in those situations.

And then when it, so when it comes to the will, and I'm not saying anything new or fresh. I mean, this is, this is in rich history of Christianity.

And obviously I think biblical as well. The will is constrained by its desire.

So the will is free to do what it wants to do. And the problem is lost people don't want

Christ. No one seeks after God. Yeah. And that's the thing, people, people have a hard time with to realize that our will is enslaved to sin.

Yes. And if you don't recognize that you're not going to, you're going to have a lot of difficulty,

I think, when we discuss what salvation is, you end up in the book, you give kind of a two -step initiatives and you have two steps there.

What do you see is when we look at the steps, how is it that salvation works? Right? Cause that's what your book is trying to answer.

So how does salvation work? The gospel must be proclaimed. And when I say that, I don't mean that a person needs to just hear the gospel in a, in a church service.

That's wonderful. They might hear Andrew preaching on the street or our friend, Michael Coughlin preaching on the street.

They might hear a, they might receive a track or they might hear Todd frill, you know what

I'm saying? Or they might read it. They may read a blog on the internet, but the point is the gospel must be proclaimed or published in some way.

And I'm definitely moving away from the idea of, well, maybe if we don't share the gospel,

God is just going to work in, in somebody's dream or something. I'm pretty adamant that we have to get the gospel to people.

And once the gospel gets to people, then, then it's up to the Lord. And we're, we're preaching the gospel and we're not just leaving it there.

But as Paul says, we're imploring men to be reconciled to God. We're pleading with them, turn from your sins, put your faith in Christ.

But what has to happen after that is the, is God must work in their life.

He must initiate a response. This is clear all over the Bible. And even, even people disagree theologically, if you can sit them in a room and talk to about this, most of the time, they will at least,

I'm talking about soteriologically, they disagree about how salvation works. Most will admit, yes.

Okay. Yes. God, a person doesn't just wake up and choose Christ. God must initiate.

He must draw them because that is the reality of where we've been left with dead in our sins.

So God, the gospel must be proclaimed and God must initiate a response. But, but isn't it the way we live?

I mean, isn't it just, you know, we should, we should, you know, live a life in such a way that, uh, sometimes we need to use words, but our life should be the gospel.

I'm hanging up now. No, no, I know. No, you're right.

You're right. Nobody, many much greater men than me have made this claim, but nobody gets saved from watching how

Andrew lives. No one gets saved from watching how Alan lives. There's no, in fact, if, if we live that mentality, what happens is people think that, um, you know what?

I'm just as good as Alan. Right. And in some cases in a certain sense, they're right.

Um, and so it actually just damns them all the worst because it offers them no hope.

Yes. They must hear the gospel. I like what, uh, our, our mutual friend, Michael Coughlin once said he, he, he kind of changed that wording, you know, share the gospel and, and sometimes use words, he, he changed that to, you know, share the gospel and sometimes use.

Amplification, you know, but, but it is, this is the whole thing where we live in a

Christianity that wants to avoid discussing theology. They think somehow theology is that's for the, the people in the ivory towers or pastors or someone like that.

But do you believe that for your pastor, but should everyone in your pews, should they be studying theology?

Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yes, because reading your Bible in one sense, reading your

Bible is studying theology. Yes. They should, they should know these matters. If we care,

I've used some of these illustrations, but if we care how to hit a baseball. I've got boys, boys, 11 and nine that we've been practicing baseball and I love to teach them, you know, how to hit a baseball and that's great fun.

But if we care about that, then why do we not care about how salvation works? Well, then here's the argument.

Well, that's difficult. That's complex. It's easier to teach them how to hit a baseball. Fine. But guess what?

Most parents are going, and this isn't just parents, but most people have been through school where they had to learn complex things like algebra or, or biology or chemistry.

And so if those things matter, then how much more does sound theology matter?

So yes, Christians must and should love theology. Obviously, I think God has gifted teachers in the church.

He has gifted the church with teachers and preachers. And so there are people who are going to spend more of their life and time doing that.

But across the board, Christians should care about studying theology. And you bring up a really good point because as parents, don't we so often teach our children things they don't want to learn, but they need to learn.

And we force them to learn. That's right. Yeah. I mean, I remember as a child sitting,

I hated, I mean, I absolutely hated having to learn Hebrew. And as a child,

I mean, I was just bad in Hebrew school. And my father to get bar mitzvahed, he had to sit down with me every single night.

And I mean, I made that as hard as I could for him. I mean, I thought if I, if I tried to make it so difficult for him, he would just say, this is too much work.

Just, you know, just memorize the words. Don't, don't translate them. I can be let off and have my evenings free, but he didn't let that, he forced it.

And he, we'd sit there every single night for two or three hours as he taught me Hebrew so I could be bar mitzvahed.

I hated it. Now, granted, if I kept up with it, it really would have been valuable now.

But, but there are times as parents, we have to force our children to learn things.

And yet when it comes to theology, so many Christian parents feel like, oh, that's just for the pastor.

We don't need to teach our children that. We don't need to learn that ourselves. Do you think that adds to the confusion over the area of salvation that we see in our culture?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, yes, that absolutely. And also the fact that the parents struggle with, it's not, so it's not as like, oh, it's not the parents is like, oh,

I've got this figured out, but it's just too hard for the kid. It's most of the time it's, well, I don't really understand this that much either.

So we're just not going to broach this subject. I remember when I first got to the church where I was pastoring at the

Chinese church and we had a retreat set up. It had been arranged before I got there.

And so they had someone speaking for that. And I ended up taking all the children, my wife and I, and, and I said, we're going to teach the kids the doctrine of the

Trinity. And I think some people were thinking like, what in the world were we thinking when we brought this guy in?

And, and they were like, kids can't learn this. I mean, we're talking about six year olds to 10 year olds.

They can't learn that. Well, in three days we went through, explain the doctrine, explain the scriptures, and we didn't work on tons of scriptures, but had them each memorize a few verses to be clear.

Uh, the, the, the thing that probably got me in the most trouble was on the last day for the parents to pick up their child.

I would have the parents sit there with the child and I would ask the parent, can you define the Trinity? And as the parents would fumble their child, six, seven, eight year old child would properly define the

Trinity. And then I would turn to the parents and say, can you support the doctrine of Trinity in scripture? And the parent would sit there and be trying to think of a scripture verse.

And then the child would recite the passages that we memorized. And all of a sudden the parents realized, yes, their children can learn theology.

And it kind of got me in a little bit of trouble because it revealed that some of the parents needed them to study theology.

Yeah, you're exactly right. And I, I, I commend you for that. And I think that the only way that we can put a stop to this sort of behavior is to just be convinced what we're talking about right now and be convinced that, you know, so on Sunday mornings, we do a little bit of a catechism with our kiddos.

We have several younger kiddos and we ask them hard questions like what is propitiation and justification?

And, and you know what, I get it. I get it. That in their mind right now at six years old or whatever, they're not fully comprehending the ramifications of that, but they're learning it and we're putting building blocks in their mind, just like you did with the

Trinity. And one day that will, that will, God, God will use that. We're confident of that.

And so you're right. So right after this commercial, what I want to do is I want to talk about what you refer to as the bare necessities and then the great exchange right after this commercial.

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And you say, well, I don't deal with Mormons all that much. Well, we should deal with evangelism.

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That should be what we're about doing. We're talking about salvation and we need to rightly understand what salvation is.

So Pastor Allen, what is the bare necessities when we talk about salvation? Yeah.

So God must initiate. So we walk through the gut. They must hear the gospel. God must initiate a response.

In that, we're really talking about regeneration. It's difficult to parse this out because some people may be thinking like, oh, you're regenerated.

And then like five years later, you repent and believe the gospel. That's not what we're talking about. God must initiate that response.

God must move that heart from death to life. And temporarily, simultaneously, a person is repenting and believing the gospel.

That's the bare necessities from our perspective. So when I say bare necessities, I'm talking about what must man do?

He must repent and believe the gospel. And so we can tease those out some more if you want.

But that's the bare necessities. Well, let's tease it out because like the very next chapter, the great exchange, which is what

Martin Luther referred to it as. You know, 2 Corinthians 5 .21, He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God.

How important is that verse in what you defined as the great exchange? Well, it's crucial.

It's, yeah, it's absolutely essential. The great exchange comes by faith and faith alone.

Even, and we want to be careful the way that we say this, but even in repentance, repentance is the other side of saving faith.

So in a way, and I say this in the book, we don't repent to get to Christ. We come to Christ in faith.

And in so doing, we repent. Repentance and faith are linked or they're inseparable.

And so we're not saying that justification is by repentance. We're saying that justification is by faith alone and Christ alone.

And so repentance is obviously going to flow out of that. We can tease that out in just a minute if you want.

But talking about this great exchange, this is absolutely foundational to the core, the core of the gospel message.

If you don't have this right, then you don't have the gospel. Because what we need is forgiveness of sins and we need the righteousness of Christ imputed to us so that we can be brought to God, clothed in the righteous robes of Jesus and forever counted as righteous, not because of what we've done, but because of what

Christ has done on our behalf. And, you know, we talk about this as necessary, this great exchange,

Christ taking our sin upon Him, giving us His righteousness. This really is the difference of eternal life and death.

I mean, you refer to it, you know, really from the title of the book, from death to life. This is why this one doctrine becomes so important, is it not?

Yes, that's right. Without this, and this is why we would have to still continue to hold the line on those people such as Roman Catholics who are right in many ways.

They're right about the Trinity. They are right about certain moral teachings, so like abortion and those sorts of things.

They rightly talk about how Scripture is breathed out by God. But they are wrong on this core issue.

And so we have to hold the line and say, look, we can't share the right hand of Christian fellowship because you are denying the core tenet of Christianity, which is justification by faith alone.

That is the only way I can stand right before God is if I have the imputed righteousness of Christ, which

He gives to me, not through the sacraments and not through things that I do, but through faith.

And the faith itself is a gift of God. So I know we're going to end up having to wrap up, but this book,

I'll tell you my impressions of your book as I read through this. I think this is a necessary book for people to get a hold of, from death to life, how salvation works for this reason.

It's not very long. It's not a very tall book. So when I say 190 pages, it was about 190 pages.

It's a quick read. It's an easy read. And yet, this is the thing that I find valuable in it.

Not only is it easy to read this, it's easy to understand the theology that you're teaching in.

And so if people don't have the knowledge, as people get into studying this doctrine, we call it soteriology, the study of salvation.

I think this is really a first book that people should be reading because it doesn't get into all of the debates, the labels that people disagree over.

It's something that when you read this book, you're going to get a good foundation of understanding what the

Bible says on this doctrine so that then when you start studying what others are saying, you have the foundation to work off of.

It's not something that you need to have a large vocabulary. You don't need to have all the degrees to understand it.

What you end up seeing here is this book is a great book for people to understand when there's debates going on over salvation.

And this is one of the biggest debated issues within Christianity because we have enemies of the faith who pretend to be

Christian, that this is the only area they want everyone to get wrong, whether they realize it or not. A hypocrite does not want to believe in the biblical gospel message.

The hypocrite wants to believe in a works -based salvation in some way or that they're good enough to go to heaven.

They want that because they don't like the true message. And you have hypocrites within the church.

We said ever since Constantine just declared everyone a Christian.

As you heard, Constantine can't declare everyone a Christian. Only God can do that. And so what you have is the fact that here is a book that becomes invaluable because of the fact that,

A, anybody can pick this up and read it. I study theology and yet there's still things I'm going, yep,

I really like that. There's still, even if you like the study of theology, it's not below anyone's understanding to pick up things.

But it is a great book for people that want to get into the discussion of studying these issues.

Many people refer to Calvinism and Arminianism and so often they don't understand what's really behind those two terms.

And more often than not, people misrepresent those two positions. This book avoids that by just dealing with what the scripture actually says by giving you the, not the labels, but the meanings.

I think this is a book that everybody should pick up. You should get it at one place. You can get it. Um, if you want to pick up a copy is it's available.

I think it's available on, on things above, right? Cause that's where I saw it. Yes, sir. Yeah. Yeah. So if you go to thingsabove .us,

um, you should be able to pick it up from there. I know that there's, um, do you guys have a store there? We don't have a store, but this has a specific, it has its own page.

So you should be able to navigate there. I'll put the, I'm going to put the link in the show notes for where you could pick up your copy of the book from death to life, how salvation works.

I suggest folks, listen, I'm going to be very clear. We're going to give away a copy and the way you're going to get a free copy will be announced in a couple of minutes.

But my suggestion to you is do not buy a single copy of this book.

Please don't. I want you to go and buy a case for your church because there's so many people that do not get this doctrine right.

And it, yet it is so important. Consider going out, getting a case of the books so that you can give them out as a gift.

Look, when you give a gift to your church, everyone loves gifts. So go and do that. Give a gift to your church, something that's going to help them invaluably to be able to understand these issues in a clear way so that then you won't be dealing with some of the things we were talking about with the easy believism and things like that.

We want to avoid that and have right theology. And so my challenge to you is to go and get the copy of the book from death to life, how salvation works, get a bunch of them to give away.

All right. Now we're going to announce, we're going to get to a giveaway of the book. If you don't already subscribe to the rap report, what in the world is wrong with you?

You should be subscribing and sharing it everywhere. Uh, we, I will say that I'm very glad. Um, we actually finally, finally that we had all 50 states covered except Vermont.

I don't know what it is with Vermont, but we, we had, we have one listen, one listener in Vermont, but we finally got that one.

Now we're covered in all 50 states, which we were in. Uh, we have listeners, um, in 79 countries, which is really nice to see.

If you find this podcast valuable, share it. Now, people will say, write a review. And I always tell people writing a review on iTunes does absolutely nothing for ratings.

Okay. It doesn't get you higher. All podcasts rate us. So, you know, give us a review.

So we get higher ratings in iTunes. It doesn't work, but it does work in greatly encouraging those of us behind the microphone and so we know that this is valuable to you, but you can write a review, but you can also email us.

You can email us. If you have some topics you want us to cover, email us at info at striving for eternity .org

info at striving for eternity .org. And if you would want a free copy of from death to life, how salvation works.

What we're going to say is if you share this episode and you put, you could be on Twitter, on, uh,

Instagram, Facebook, wherever you want to share it. But if you share this episode with the hashtag rap report, that's wrapped with two

P's hashtag rap report. And if you don't know what the hashtag is, that's a little pound sign. It just makes it easy to search.

We will be searching to see who it is that shared it. We'll get that list. We'll randomly pick someone and that person will get a copy of from death to life.

So if you share this episode with your friends, whether on Facebook, on Twitter, Instagram, put hashtag rap report, we'll look for that.

We will pick a winner, uh, probably about two weeks after this episode drops.

So we have time because a lot of people subscribe and they listen. Some people will listen a day or two later a week or two later.

So, uh, you have a chance. Don't think that just because it drops the first day we're going to do it. No, we're going to give it about two weeks.

Uh, and we do think, thank Alan for not only his time, but he's the one that provided this free book for you.

So when you, whoever wins, you have to now go buy a case, just saying. No, but I do,

I do think that this is a book that should be bought in bulk to share with, with friends. I really do.

And it's something that is good for you to give out at your churches. And so Alan, if I don't know if there's anything else you would like to share with the audience, anything else that's on your heart before we wrap up?

Yeah, sure. So the book writing thing is not about making money for me. Obviously it does cost to write a book and it is obviously beneficial to me and my family to when we do make money.

But you know, if they'll go on that, uh, if they'll go on that, the link of thingsabove .us and just, there's a place you can leave notes, just mentioned that you heard this conversation on the wrap report and, uh,

I'll, I'll give you even more of a discount. We do discounts on, on, on bulk orders anyway. But if you'll tell me that you, that you heard about this because of Andrew's podcast, then for sure,

I'll, I'll, I'll knock out a little bit more. Or if you're just out there, you say, I really want this book, but you're honestly in a situation, you just can't buy a book right now.

You reach out to me, contact me. I'd love to send you one. And obviously I can't do that all the time, but I would love to,

I'd love to be able to connect and, and cause I think it's this important, you know, and I pretty, I really want to say thank you to you,

Andrew, because you've encouraged me with your kind words and at the, at the end of the day, um, uh, one of the things

I tried to do in the book is to footnote lots of scripture because at the end of the day, that's what I want is I want us to read the

Bible and I want us to understand truly how this is. Let's cut out the noise of labels and let's just think about for a moment what the scriptures tell us on this, and then let's apply that and let's adjust our methods accordingly.

Yeah. I mean, I think that what you end up seeing is this is a huge issue that we need to, we need to address in Christianity.

Unfortunately, we would think it shouldn't need to be, but it does. And I think that folks, if you take advantage of that, there is a way to leave a note on their website that the book's available on Amazon and Kindle and people like to go there and do that.

My encouragement is for you to go. Um, you can go to thingsabove .us slash from death to life.

And that link will get you to where you can, you can leave a, you know, send an email and send, uh, for you to be able to, to pick up some copies.

Um, go there, get some, you know, the, the reason that to go there rather than Amazon, Amazon's convenient.

I agree. But Alan's the one that spent his time writing this. And if we're paying Amazon and I know as an author, you don't make a lot of money if you're putting your books on Amazon because they make the money.

So I encourage folks to go right to his blog site, the things above that us and get it from there, if you can.

Uh, it would, it would get more money in his pocket rather than Amazon's and they have enough anyway.

Alan, thanks for coming on. I appreciate, I appreciate the work you did in this book. It's a, it's a great work and I think it's something that people should be getting ahold of.

Thank you, brother. All right. Until next time we, I, we ran out of time to do our spiritual transition game.

Just didn't want to, to do that. But, uh, for folks who want, we do spiritual transitions. You can actually go to the

Striving for Eternity YouTube channel. We have videos there, training people how to transition from the natural world to spiritual world.

It's important when we're going to talk about a doctrine like this on salvation. It's important to know how to navigate a conversation so you could take any conversation and get it to the gospel.

It's good to do. We just don't have time for it today, but Alan, I want to thank you for coming on and for folks who are listening, subscribe, share, and remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.